White Queen As It Began
by Akiko Keeper of Sheep
Summary: He doesn't love Derek. Not like he'd loved her. But he thinks that's okay, because Derek doesn't love him, either. Probably.


_My goddess hear my darkest fear/I speak too late/It's forever more that I wait/Dear friend goodbye/No tear in my eyes/So sad it ends/As it began_

_:::_

It's more mist than rain when they get to the cemetery. It's damp across his face, and he can almost pretend it's grief that's wet his cheeks. He knows it's not, wonders at that briefly before the thought puffs away through his metaphorical fingers like so much smoke.

Everything in his head is smoke and mirrors these days.

"She wouldn't want you to do this to yourself," Scott had said, shifting from foot to foot uneasily as Stiles had worked the end of the tie through the knot, pulling it a bit too tight and wondering why it took a noose to make his throat seize up. "She wouldn't have wanted you to blame yourself."

Stiles hadn't answered. He knew what she would have wanted. She would have wanted to live, but he knows better than to say things like that now. The look on his best friend's face when he'd slipped up before had nearly pierced the strange, hazy cocoon Stiles had woken up in.

They'd said he'd been lucky to wake up at all.

He's pretty sure he'd managed not to laugh out loud.

:::

Jackson is there, had flown in just for this. He finds Stiles by the punch bowl. It's a plain bowl, and there are fresh orange slices floating in it like inner tubes, and Stiles stares at them, unseeing. The punch is too bright and too thin, and it doesn't remind him at all of blood slopping through his fingers. Not at all.

"They told me you were with her," Jackson says quietly, staring down at the orange slices like he thinks maybe Stiles has found the secret to life in them. "At the end."

Stiles hums, reaching for the ladle and chasing a bit of the fruit up the side of the bowl until he can pluck it up with his fingers.

"Did she..." Jackson breathes in deeply, hands shoved into his pockets, and Stiles knows he's probably clawed his thighs to shreds several times over. "Did she say...did she mention me?"

She'd been too busy gurgling up blood and bile and gasping for air to say anything, not after the initial scream, and he's about to tell Jackson this when he meets the other man's eyes. They're wide, and red-rimmed, and they don't match his stoic expression and the tilt of his chin at all. Stiles remembers, then, that he's not supposed to say things like that, so he shrugs, instead.

"She loved you," he says, tearing the peel of the orange away and nibbling at the fruit. "So there's that."

:::

Stiles hates being alone now. It reminds him too much of the moment he'd suddenly been alone in the woods, only cooling meat that had used to be someone he loved for company. He hates the analog clocks the most. The tick-tock reminds him too much of a heartbeat, and it makes him angry when it doesn't stop like the heartbeat had. It had only taken a couple of instances of his dad coming home to find a clock in pieces on the floor before he'd taken all but the digital sort out of the house.

The issue is, Stiles doesn't have many people to turn to for company. They all talk too much, say too little, and push, push, push. Scott tries, of course. Tries so hard it makes Stiles even angrier. Scott tries to be patient, to be understanding, to be normal. Stiles doesn't want normal, he just wants quiet. With that in mind, it almost seems natural to turn to Derek.

Derek, who knows loss better than anyone, who knows anger and helplessness and who doesn't push. Doesn't try. Probably doesn't care enough for that idea to even occur to him.

The first time he shows up at Derek's door, panting from an impromptu run through the woods and smudged with dirt, the wolf actually looks startled. He lets Stiles in, though, makes him tea and leaves him to himself, thumbing through a worn copy of _A Wrinkle In Time_. Stiles curls up at the other end of the couch, sipping his tea and listening to the slip-slip of pages, letting his anger cool until it's only a slight simmer beneath his skin. He leaves once his hands stop shaking, balancing the mug on the arm of the couch and not bothering with a goodbye.

He'd never liked goodbyes. He likes them even less now.

:::

Isaac is the worst of the lot.

Stiles supposes it's partly due to his past. There's a directionless, targetless nature to the anger that's constantly roiling in his belly, and he's sure Isaac knows it. Worries. Remembers.

Isaac knows what that kind of anger can do to people.

He doesn't talk to Stiles. He skirts him, orbiting him at some unspecified distance, eyes darting and searching and wary, but never meeting Stiles'.

"He's scared of me," he tells the cover of Derek's book eventually, tilting his mug back and forth and watching the dregs drift about at the bottom of the cup. It had been something floral, he's sure, something designed to be soothing. He stomps on the urge to throw the cup at Derek's head.

Derek doesn't say anything, although he does shut the tattered book and look towards Stiles.

Derek doesn't meet Stiles' gaze anymore, doesn't pin him with cold-colored eyes that somehow manage to burn. He looks at Stiles' forehead, at his shoulder, at the wall behind him. Stiles is grateful, mostly because he can't be sure what would happen if Derek did look him in the eye. Part of him thinks he might even cry.

"He's a werewolf now," Stiles says, tilting his head and peering at the soggy remains of his tea. It looks like a pile of soggy plant matter. He wonders what that says about his future. "He shouldn't be scared of me."

"He's not," Derek replies, going back to his book. "He's scared for you."

We all are, the alpha doesn't say. Stiles pretends he didn't hear it, anyway.

:::

He does cry when Derek looks him in the eye, finally. He just isn't sure why.

He isn't sure about much of anything, though, so that's nothing new.

Derek is staring down at him where he lies, just there, just where she'd lain for hours and hours. Derek's standing where Stiles had knelt for hours and hours, watching him with too much softness, and Stiles remembers the screams - not hers, his - the rough rawness of his throat and the blackness that has crawled across his vision.

The air leaves his lungs in a jerky huff, and he feels tears dripping into his ears. He doesn't move, staring up at the canopy and remembering that hearing is supposedly the last sense to go when one is dying. He wonders if she's carried his cries for help with her. If his voice would follow her to...wherever she went.

"Do you think she was afraid?"

"You were," Derek says after a brief silence, and Stiles suddenly realizes that Derek can smell fear, can probably smell it still, drenched into the ground like her blood and his tears.

"She never seemed afraid. Not like she should have been. Even when she was going crazy, she kept it a lot more together than I would have. She was stronger than me."

Derek kneels beside him, but doesn't touch him, and Stiles can't stop staring at his eyes, even though the tears are coming faster and thicker and are blurring the world. Derek's eyes are dry, and tired, and Stiles thinks that maybe he's just stopped mourning altogether. That maybe Derek's tears are all burned away.

"You're strong," Derek says quietly, hands resting loose and palm-up in his lap.

Stiles curls up and cries, silent and shivering.

:::

"You can't be angry forever, son," the sheriff says quietly, stirring something probably too-salty in the stockpot on the stove.

Stiles doesn't agree. He's pretty sure he can.

:::

The next time Derek looks Stiles in the eye, they're rutting furiously up against the front door. They don't put their hands on each other - Derek digs his claws into the wood above Stiles' head, and Stiles presses his palms back against the door, arms loose at his sides. Derek sucks angry bruises up and down Stiles' neck, and a ring of them like a necklace along his collarbone.

Stiles hisses and bucks, head banging back against the door as he comes, sickening and thunderous and guilty.

Derek doesn't move away when he should, doesn't let Stiles leave like he's supposed to. He trails his nose along Stiles' jawline, breath puffing warmly over the younger man's throat, and his hands fall to Stiles' shoulders. Hot fingers pluck at Stiles' shirt. The motion is shy, somehow, and Stiles wants to hit him, claw at him, lay him open and exposed.

Slowly, Derek lifts his head and meets his gaze again, guarded and questioning, and Stiles' anger bleeds away.

He cries instead, and Derek finally moves, says nothing when Stiles jerks the door open and stumbles on shaky, newborn-lamb legs to his Jeep.

:::

"I don't get it," he says to the clouds, eyes tracking them as they drift lazily over his head. He feels her name, carved out cold and clean, pressing into his shoulders, just like it's carved into him.

"Hmm?" Derek looks up at him, fingers threading through the grass beside him, thumb of his other hand turning the page of a new book.

"I don't get it. Death. Which is stupid, right?" Stiles slips sideways, the gravestone catching at the back of his shirt briefly, and stretches out on the grass. His head is crushing a bouquet that had been left there, but he doesn't much care. "I mean, I've seen enough of it. It's happened enough around me. I just...I don't get it. How does it even...how does..."

Derek closes his book, but does Stiles the courtesy of silently averting his eyes.

"She was alive," he breathes, and suddenly it doesn't matter that Derek's not looking at him, because the tears are welling up, anyway. "She was so alive. We were laughing, even, and then...then...we weren't. She wasn't. I don't...h-how does..."

"I don't know," Derek whispers, reaching out and ghosting his fingertips against Stiles'. "I don't know."

:::

He probably could have been angry forever, he thinks as he folds his socks together. He probably could have been angry until the end of time.

It's tiring, though. Not just the anger, either. All of it. The grief, the fear, the guilt. It drains him constantly. He doesn't like it, doesn't want it, and he thinks maybe Scott had been right before the funeral. He thinks she would have rolled her eyes at him, exaspirated and impatient. She'd never had much time for people who wallowed.

She would have told him to get over it.

He holds up two socks, old enough to be more gray than white. One is short, the other long, and he sighs through his nose.

"What do you think?"

Scott looks up from his textbook, brow furrowed in a ridiculously earnest way. "Uh...they're socks?"

"I can't believe you're worried about getting into college with that kind of brain at your disposal," Stiles snorts, and he breathes a little better when Scott's lips twitch into a small grin.

He wonders how worried they'd all really been, and folds the mis-matched socks together and tosses them onto the pile.

:::

The sex is less violent the second time. He even lets Derek pull him into bed, stretching him out and taking his time, like Stiles is something special. Like it means something. It probably does.

It's not as quick, either, and things - feelings - shift inside him, ones he doesn't recognize, which should worry him. He's too warm and boneless to bother. He doesn't cry this time, and he doesn't complain when Derek makes him spoon, even though they're sticky and sweaty and falling asleep together makes everything feel weird. It probably is.

"I'm leaving for college the day after tomorrow," he mumbles over his coffee the next morning. Derek doesn't reply, just nods. He doesn't seem sad or angry about it. Not that he should. But then, Stiles thinks that maybe it's because Derek's default emotion is sad-and-angry. And maybe it's not that Derek doesn't mourn each new loss. Maybe he just never stopped mourning. Maybe mourning is all he ever does.

"I'll send a postcard from New York," he promises. He's not sure why. He thinks Derek probably wouldn't notice if Stiles dropped off the face of the earth. The easy set of the werewolf's shoulders is testament to that. His leaving shouldn't change a thing.

It probably will.

He doesn't love Derek. Not like he'd loved her. But he thinks that's okay, because Derek doesn't love him, either.

Probably.

:::

He swipes his fingers gently over the hard lines of her name, mouth moving to shape it soundlessly.

"He won't miss me. Not really. He'll think he does, or think he should. Maybe."

The chill breeze ruffles his hair like ghostly fingers, and Stiles considers buzzing it close again. He smiles, though, and it isn't as painful as he'd imagined it would be.

"Yeah. He'll be fine."

:::

He should be more surprised, he thinks, when he comes back to his dorm fresh out of physics to find his window propped open and an alpha werewolf dozing in his bed.

Rolling his eyes, he moves _Through The Looking Glass_ from where it's splayed open across Derek's chest. Warm eyes peer at him through dark lashes.

"Miss'd y'," the man rumbles, more growl than words.

Stiles snorts. "Of course you did. Who wouldn't miss me?"

He only resists a little when Derek tugs him down onto the bedspread, and he's very confused when, instead of disrobing Stiles, Derek wraps around him, breathing deeply, and drifts off again.

He's supposed to be going to his next class soon, but he can't make himself wriggle away. He's not sure Derek would let him. He's definitely sure he doesn't want to think about why.

He lets sleep claim him, breathing in the scent of hair product and laundry soap and dried leaves that make up Derek, and tells himself he'll only stay for a little bit. He tells himself he isn't glad when he wakes up and Derek's still there.

He doesn't really believe it.

:::

It's more mist than rain when they wander down the rows of gravestones, just barely too close, pinkie fingers brushing in silent reassurance.

"She'd laugh at us, wouldn't she?"

Derek hums thoughtfully.

Sties crouches down, brushing his fingers over her name. He likes to think she'd be okay with this, with them. He's still nervous, inexplicably, pointlessly, when he reaches up to clutch at Derek's fingers. Like she might be able to see them. Like she might judge him, might resent him for moving on.

"She'd threaten to skin me and nail my werewolf hide to her wall if I hurt you," Derek muses, fingernails scratching lightly at Stiles' palm.

"Would not."

"She would. She loved you."

Old anger rises, but it's weak and pitiful, and it gurgles uselessly against his heart. "Shut up."

Derek doesn't, but Stiles isn't shocked or anything. Derek's an asshole, even if he is sweet and affectionate and pathetically clingy sometimes.

"Just because she wasn't in love with you," Derek murmurs, "doesn't mean she didn't love you."

Stiles props the flowers up against the gravestone, covering the date of death in a spray of purple and blue petals. "Yeah."

It's only a little weird when Derek doesn't let go of his hand once he stands, threading their fingers together instead as they walk away. It's affectionate and familiar, and even though it's not quite love yet, it could be. Maybe.

Someday.


End file.
